Friends With Benefits: Another Silly, Tired “Engagement” Debate

My general impression of the new North Korea blog 38 North is that it’s mostly the same old crap from the same old people who’ve been proposing the same demonstrably failed approaches to North Korea for the last 20 years. They’ve finally published one thing of interest to me, however, a response to John Feffer by Roberta Cohen of the liberal Brookings Institute. If anyone can show me that anyone to the right of Cohen has ever been published on 38 North, I’ll buy you a cookie. Nor would I call 38 North a true blog with regards to format or style — it’s more of an online op-ed page, only with a smaller audience. This general lack of balance and originality is especially unfortunate because there are some smart, sensible, and not-necessarily left-of-center people at SAIS’s U.S.-Korea Institute, which puts out 38 North. Perhaps more broadly, the real failure of originality is with the Foreign Policy Industry itself, for which we should be thankful that John Feffer at least breaks up the soccer-like scoreless ennui.

Cohen’s arguments against Feffer won’t be unfamiliar to OFK regulars, and certainly on the specific questions of North Korea’s willful disregard for the welfare of its people, Cohen argues the points well enough with the wealth of evidence available to her. After all, John Feffer is to pristine logic what Stephen Hawking is to ballroom dancing, and it’s always obvious where Feffer is really coming from:

Feffer, nonetheless, would side with North Korea in accusing those trying to hold it to account as being “politically motivated.

Treating North Korea differently, as Feffer proposes, and looking away when Pyongyang violates human rights standards it has freely accepted seems an odd privilege to extend to any country, particularly to one whose violations are so egregious. Human rights treaties do not contain escape clauses that excuse violations on the grounds that the country is not yet ready to assume its obligations. Making North Korea into a human rights exception will create the patronizing relationship that Feffer, with his social work sensitivities, so deplores, and undermine the goals of the international human rights system.

Thing is, my own views on this topic have evolved to the point were I now think Feffer and Cohen are both wrong — Feffer for the familiar reason that he’s a tool who seldom says anything that’s not already a proven falsehood, and Cohen because she believes that “engaging” the North Korean government will change its behavior (that word again — so we have to give them a ring, too?). To support her argument, Cohen cites a host of laws that North Korea has ostensibly altered under international pressure, though she can cite no more evidence than Feffer or anyone else can that this has done any good for the North Korean people. Nonetheless, she says:

If any of these reforms have helped even one prisoner, one person, or one family, the process has been worthwhile.

I like Cohen, but I respectfully disagree. Even assuming that the reforms were real and had helped one prisoner, they’re not worthwhile if they come at the cost of legitimizing, funding, and prolonging a regime that will hurt millions more over years. That’s really the problem with all kinds of engagement with North Korea — only rarely can anyone really prove that it’s done any good for anyone but Kim Jong Il himself, or that any form of engagement has materially changed the character or behavior of his regime for the better.

By contrast, I can cite ample evidence for the fact that millions suffer needlessly for every day foreign money preserves Kim Jong Il’s misrule. The urgent priority beneath all of the others, then, is to get rid of the regime itself, and the least painful way I see of doing that begins with defenestrating the regime economically and ends with empowering the people to alter or abolish it. Oddly enough, this principle was easy enough for the Human Rights Industry and just about every liberal pressure group in the case of South Africa under apartheid. But now, in a case where the abuses are far more grave, extensive, and intractable, we can only manage to argue over just how understanding and patient we should be before we talk to Kim Jong Il about human rights at all.